A good guild for people who want to apply a patent. This blog contains any basic information about patent application and how to use patent search engine to help your application.

2010年10月8日星期五

Choosing a Suitable Patent Search Engine

Before you start a patent application, searching patent information could make you know the technical achievements in your industry which has been protected by law and its claim, status. Then you could flexibility and appropriately write the patent claims and description of your core technology or product, and make some adjustment and changes to the protection range of your rights to avoid patent infringement. Ultimately prior patent searching job can improve the success rate of patent applications which maximally prevent your invention or technology imitated by others to make you suffer a loss.

Here, we compare several patent search engines to convenient you to choose the most suitable patent search tools when you consider patenting a idea/invention. These patent search engines are classified by charged payment.

If you want to quickly select a patent search tool, just skip the following part, directly read the evaluation part - “RECOMMEND RATE” given by us.

Free Patents Online is a useful entry level tool for searching patent free. It compares well with regards to other free patent search systems in terms of managing queries, alerts, and saving records. The weighting operators are worth checking out as a different way to hone searches.

The unique patent display style, google patent allows keyword searching patent applications and highlighting within document images, and the very fast search and image load times set this tool apart.

Advantage: Fast Speed

Disadvantage: Only US patents, Incomplete Data

Recommend Rate

Patsnap: ★★★★

New patent search tool with multiple functions

If some little bugs can be fixed and speed up, it will be a excellent helper for patent workers.

Freepatentsonline: ★★★★☆

Most famous free patent search site

Many lawyers or technicists’ first choice

Esp@cenet: ★★★☆

Official Intellectual Property Service. If you want to search for latest patent info, it is the best choice.

Google Patent Search: ★★☆

Only I cannot visit all of the above, I will use this. Google is always stable, isn’t it? =)

Paid Patent Search Engine

Limited by the budget, I cannot check all paid patent search engines. Here is a list of some recommended patent search services.

Delphion: A decent tool for quick or occasional patent searchers; probably not ideal for full time patent searchers compared to other systems. Convenient.

EAST: The service is a very powerful tool, especially for searching US data. Lightning-fast image searching is ideal for searchers in the mechanical.

QPat: The tool is one of the only systems to offer the unique FamPat file, with its exclusive definition of patent families. Although the actual data.

SureChem: Highly effective free chemical structure searching tool with valuable chemical indexing. It is not a substitute for paid tools such as STN which can do more detailed chemical searching.

PatBase Express: The tool provides functionality that is easy for beginners to learn, and coverage is large for a system with such a simple interface. However, the tool purposely lacks functionality needed by advanced and commercial searchers.

All the paid patent search engines mentioned above can be found in google by searching their names.

At last, here is a good tutorial video to do a patent search on uspto.gov. Hope it is helpful to you.